Forms of disenchantment: Kant and Neo-Kantianism in the early work of Walter Benjamin

The German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin (1892--1940) has been variously interpreted as a forerunner of structuralism and post-structuralist theories of language, or as an early proponent of Critical Theory, who, in his syncretic combination of materialist and mystical modes of thought, stood at odds with the mainstream of Marxist orthodoxy. In the critical reconstructions of Benjamin's thought, as well as the hagiographies of his life, commentators have noted his early engagement with the writings of Immanuel Kant and the Neo-Kantian philosophy of the early twentieth century. But readings that acknowledge his encounter with the Kantian tradition have often underestimated the seriousness of that encounter. I argue in this dissertation that many of the major concepts that dominate the landscape of Benjamin's mature work---myth, experience, the theory of progress---emerge from his reworking of Kantian themes during the formative years of his career.; Max Weber's thesis of the disenchanted world, itself informed by Neo-Kantian categories, comprises the larger, interpretive horizon within which I understand Benjamin's readings of key Kantian texts. I see in his early work not a critique of re-enchantment, but an attempt to include and account for the irreducibly metaphysical moment that survives disenchantment. His reworking of the transcendental method bequeathed by Kant can only be understood in the context of Benjamin's resistance to the view that modern experience is ineluctably barren and calculable.